Shudder.
I still recall when Kurt was in Virginia working for MRJ and I was left in Texas with the boys getting the house ready for sale. The moving packers had just finished with the house when they came to the interior door to the garage and one said “Oh, Shiiiiiiiiit!” Because the 2 car garage in McKinney, looked the the Oakton garage. Too much accumulated stuff…and we left things. Moving from a 2 car garage to no garage in Virginia. So my sons describe Kurt’s office in the basement as being so crammed with stuff (paperwork? I don’t know) that you could slide into the chair in front of the computer desk and that was pretty much it. Kurt gathered current information, he kept magazines and also contracts from the past and certain tools to fix computers. But he began to accumulate tools as he took on homeowner needs and projects and especially when disaster struck.
In Oakton we lived in a bowl of a yard and when it rained, the excess came down the hillsides, ran across the yard and sometimes down the cellar stairs. We have had copper pipes develop leaks from acid water and the water heater leak all over. Kurt would be up at 2 am (he was always a night owl anyway) going back and forth to Home Depot, figuring out what tools he needs and learning to fix stuff on the fly in the middle of the night. He was pretty fearless and seldom asked for help (expensive help), but he learned a lot on the fly. Meanwhile. over 25 years, he accumulated many tools and more *stuff* for experiments and found that some things were hard to get rid of because you had to hit the one special day of the year when hazardous wastes or electronic things could be disposed of.
Anyway, when we moved in and had a huge nice garage, a number of items never left their boxes on the floor since 2004. And they mouldered. And Kur’ts propensity to do a cleanup but shoving things into boxes and hiding them in the garage out o sight meant he couldn’t locate certain smaller tools and would go an buy new ones. It will be amazing when we find out how many copies of identical tools we have when all is accounted for. It was a garage situation I dreaded having the door open in case neighbors might see. But it didn’t seem to faze my husband! He had his computer tower out there too! But other things he worked on in the Man Cave.
But here is what I wonder, is it typical for a person who is so good at organizing things, keeping on top of requirements for work and systems engineering to be so disorganized at home? Geez. This would have driven me nuts. Ok men, speak up! Whyyyyyyyyyy??????
